Abnormalization

I’m quite abnormal, aren’t I?

I make promises, express thoughts symbolically, and celebrate what I believe to be true, good, and beautiful. However, I also spend my days mindlessly engrossed by flattened representations of reality, heave scalding insults onto metal boxes when they cut me off, and relish the downfall of those whose positions I’d rather occupy (and thus relish my own downfall, yikes). Abnormal, indeed, for better or for worse.

But to be abnormal implies a normality from which I depart. Just as a common melody thrums throughout the myriad-mindedness of Nature, so a common nature binds humanity. To do away with that nature—that normality—would leave me stranded without reference: a dull, lonesome, infertile asteroid adrift in the dark. Wouldn’t I be wiser to embrace that nature, as a planet embraces its molten core: a core that burns bright like his fellow planets: a core that flames in the image of the magnanimous Star he orbits?

Perhaps it’s only after embracing that nature that we come to receive the cosmic garments and lunar jewelry that offer each of us our unique, eccentric, celestial charm. This planetary uniqueness reflects abnormality proper. But, from the voids of space emerge colonies of unmoored colossi who yearn for the molten nectar sloshing within your core, and it is these impersonal colossal forces that seek to drain your radiant nature, so full of promise, and leave in its place a False Promise that sends you adrift to nowhere.

The False Promise is this: That you will find fulfillment alone.

Vasily Kandinsky, Several Circles, 1926

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Alone. Alone reflects abnormality improper. Alone departs all normalcy: it is anormal. Alone is not the sort of brooding solitude necessary to incubate rich character, for, as we brood, the hymns of humanity, like beautiful choruses of birdsong, still resound our walls and pour into our open windows. No, ‘alone’ slams those windows shut and thrusts us into the lap of a deafening silence where not even our own voice can be heard.

Starved by silence, we hunger for noise, and it is this fragmentary hunger that sustains our disintegration. Alone we are divided into atoms as the colossi crumble our wholeness into particles, gobbling most and leaving us with fragments of fragments. Yet, delighting in the taste of ourselves, our grumbling atomic bellies are kept quiet for the next few moments as we become oblivious to our oblivionation, self-unaware of our self-annihilation.

Atomization lies at the heart of abnormalization improper. When the world atomizes, the colossi grow.

—

An apple speaks for itself, its value is self-evident. It has a long history alongside our bodies. It burns as we do, offers itself as we do. It is normal.

Conversely, foods processed by the colossi are abnormal. Unlike the processes of Nature, those that serve up artificially processed foods are not with you, but against you. They are hollow. They speak to nothing profound in your body and thus have no voice, so that advertising and other artificial amplifiers shout and scream to compensate for their lack. But doesn’t noisy packaging and advertising betray the product contained? Wouldn’t quality speak for itself?

The wise advise against lathering foods in sauces (see e.g., Socrates¹ and Krishna²): quality food needs no lathering. And we are thankfully reawakening to this wisdom of moderation in diet, although an unwise response lingers: artificial moderation. Tell me, do I magically evade the harms of industrial beverages because they contain artificial sweeteners whose energy my body can’t metabolize? It could be true that, despite their sweetness, my body is immune to their energy. I’m told that this is a virtue of the beverage, with its glittering zero calorie label; that, because the diligent cellular laborers of my body fumble with its abnormal contents, my body’s somehow the better for it; that this abnormal exposure will somehow normalize my body back into health; and, most fundamentally, that we can achieve pure pleasure without consequence. But apart from flowing through my body, doesn’t its ‘artificial’ pleasure still mingle with my soul? Doesn’t the glutton within still get fed?

My glutton, drunk on distilled pleasure, assures me that the consequences of indulging are worthwhile. So, when the colossi serve me another False Promise cocktail, I graciously accept in drunken delight. Drinks these days are being garnished with what seems to me a prevalent illusion: that nutrients divorced from their wholes yield the same nutrients; that a flower deracinated from its soil yields the same flower. Is the vitamin C packed in a pill the same as that enveloped in the sweet vital juice and tissues of fruit? Are the mounds of powdered protein portioned in laboratories the same as those we find in eggs, legumes, or nuts? Do the arrays of sterile supplements lining our cupboards really contain the lifegiving substances that we are assured they do? I’m not sure. But I am sure that if you listen to a song note by note, the song is lost. Instead, listen closely and you might hear the False Promise whispering...

—

It could be that supplemental nutrition is a concession we must live with in exchange for the privileges of modern convenience, as monoculture crops and livestock, fertilized by the False Promise and showered with antibiotics and pesticides, starve for nutrients themselves. And it could be likewise with supplemental medicine, as our monoculture urban populations, fertilized also by the False Promise and showered with amphetamines and antidepressants, starve for vitality and purpose. Convenience is a gift that comes at a cost, and the colossi demand payment.

When we take out loans on life, it is the colossi who collect (dis)interest. Consider painkillers. Does indulging in painkillers stop the cause of my chronic pain? Painkillers only provide me with proximate solutions, not ultimate, blinding me to why I hurt in the first place. And without that ultimate why, I worship the proximate what that my psyche drapes upon my sensory signals: pain (or pleasure, if the wheel of Lady Fortune happens to land on me). So, off I go, brimming with nearsighted confidence, laying that nasty pain upon the sacrificial altar, yet tragically lacking the perspective that I fashion myself—the One Who Hurts, the Ultimate Victim—upon that altar, offering myself for nothing, to nothing. And nothing thrives on artificial painkillers, because it thrives on the short-sighted-proximate, which sedates and blinds us to the colossal forces slurping up our nectar and the eternal damnation and suffering that awaits our neglected future.

And so, instead of candlelit shrines decked with sacred icons nestled away in a humble corner of the home, I now drift groggily into my bathroom and kneel before a medicine cabinet decked in mirrors, mirrors that eerily reflect to me my idol of worship: me, alone. Opening this medicinal shrine bathes me in the orange glow of an abnormal treasure indeed: an atomized assortment of child-locked bottles, all labeled with foreign arrangements of letters that speak to nothing wholesome within me. Isn’t it curious that I, as an adult, mindlessly bypass the child-lock? Wouldn’t I be wise to heed its warning? What if a child still lives within me? Aren’t I continually splashed afresh by his overflowing wonder? If I were to self-medicate, wouldn’t I sedate him as well—that child whose wonder blazes within my core?

Discomfort is central to life: it is profoundly normal to feel uncomfortable (despite discomfort feeling abnormal); thus, attempts to escape discomfort through artificial means, paradoxically, abnormalize us. ‘No need to tolerate discomfort,’ the colossi assure, ‘Quick, take this! Treat yourself!’ How cunning. They reassure us that this discomfort we feel is abnormal, and that they have the solution: dull, mindless, blissful isolation. But my inner child sees past their ruse, guarding my nature from their False Promise. He longs for immersion in chirping meadows and jungle gyms, not isolation. And while the colossi strain to outnumber him in all their quantitative largess, thrusting dosages and diagnoses and measures upon him, the quality of his innocent laughter weaves playfully, resounds effortlessly through their munitions. If I were to just listen closely, and have patience (after all, haven’t I buried him long enough?), his laughter might guide me back home...

—

Like attracts like. But the colossi are pure absence: nothing. They do not burn, do not attract, as our brilliant Star does. But they know that we, containing some likeness of our Star within, too possess a gravity. They therefore extract our essences and lather them over their hollow frames to give the impression that they burn, using us against ourselves. Alas, we thus worship the colossi through an artifice of self, and, in doing so, lose ourselves and become like them: shallow, absent, hollow.

And so we are being entertained to death. They draw out my molten essence over here, and wave a glowing fragment over there. And how delightful that fragment is! Look, look! It shines just like I do! Adrift, I chase the fragments, plunging into a field of perpetual, meaningless advertisements guised as entertainment and connection. Adrift, I am steeped ablaze in the False Promise. I gaze at screens that feed me my reflection just as my medicine cabinet did; I am bathed in an unnatural glow just as my pill bottles did; and I am offered fragmented and short-lived doses of bliss just as my pills did. Back to the sacrificial altar I go…

In losing myself in these artifices, so I distance myself from Nature’s flowing beauty, a beauty that simply brims with self-evidentiary advertisements that invite only my earnest participation. Instead, as I am held within Her womb and stroll about in Her mellifluence, I refuse to taste Her and, instead, try to bottle Her up! Alas, I bottle myself. Intoxicated by the False Promise, steeped in hubris, my exploitative mind brushes away Her invitations and instead tries to capture Her—to make Her mine. I plant myself and branch out my arms like the swaying trees of Her dress, reaching this way and that, but instead of splaying my leaves to drink Her in, I turn my leaves inwards, clutch my camera, and satisfy myself with feeble, static re-presentations of Her everflowing beauty. I yearn to capture Her. I demand She bend for me in 4K.

But Nature won’t bend: She cannot be captured. Instead, I bend into myself, enslave myself, my inward facing leaves dismissing Her glow, and instead devour myself. But even with my hands and feet stuffed down my throat, Her gentle warmth washes over my hunched, disfigured body, with a reminder that she always offers Herself completely, if I would just reciprocate and offer myself to Her...

—

I said earlier that discomfort is central to life. But, truly, our Star is central. Gathered into His orbit, we reach and grope towards His brilliance—a brillance against which we are necessarily outshined. Cast in the light of His shadow, I am reminded how meager my light is compared to His. How discomforting.

My response to this brilliance can be either fruitful or fruitless. The fruitless occurs when I fall into the self-conscious perspective: the view from without: the view from nowhere. What I mean by this is that I step outside, and look back upon, myself. I consider myself as central: things now revolve around me. Looking upon myself in this manner, I find myself separate from my Star. And, now seemingly separate, I notice my light compared to His and realize how pitiful I am relative to Him! I may also notice that He only drapes upon me His shadow, and grow frustrated that I wasn’t given more of His light.

Overwhelmed by this discomfort, I flee. I reduce my self-referential scope so as to avoid considering that overwhelming Ultimate over there, and instead worship the delightful proximate over here: the False Promise. In this narrow view, I estrange myself from my Star, curling instead inwards. And here arrives a colossal admition: the colossi, all along, were simply the embodiment of this self-consciousness, and they are pure absence because self-consciousness inevitably self-annihilates, churning the self into nothing. For, when I am self-conscious, I mistake my light for the Source, grow frustrated when others don’t recognize me as their Source, and further estrange myself from them, too. To console myself, I zoom in even further, gaining confidence and certainty as I lock into evershrinking views of myself, yet meanwhile grow less tolerant of the growing uncertainty around me, and thus less tolerant of discomfort (for discomfort is uncertainty embodied). Self-consciousness thus dooms me to a crushing cowardice: to a perpetual fleeing from discomfort that furthers me from my Norm, my Star, and thus abnormalizes me towards an infertile oblivion.

Fruitfulness, on the other hand, blossoms from the conscious perspective: the view from within. This is not a looking inwards; that would land us back in our self-referential view. To be conscious is, literally, to know with³. This knowing with yields a sort of attention that flows from within and emanates out, in likeness to how our Star emanates His light. And, when our attention outpours in this way, rather than being separate from our observations, we now identify with⁴—become one with—them.

Though, from this perspective we are still faced with the overwhelming brilliance of our Star. This overwhelm is no less painful than the one we experience from our self-conscious perspective. Life is suffering, either way. But herein lies the difference: having entered into and identified with the field of experience that extends beyond—to friends, to loved ones, to Nature, to Being itself—I now have something worth enduring discomfort for. I now have a reason to hold myself together as entropy rips me apart. I now have a purpose. And since my relationship with that field of experience is fundamentally enabled by His brilliant light, really, I’m embracing discomfort for Him. Not only that, but, oddly enough, I am embracing Him and all His glorious mysteriousness when I embrace discomfort.

This courageous embrace brings us closer to Him, fashioning us more in His likeness. But what is He actually like? Is He normal, abnormal? Well…He’s Normal, in that He’s the common ordinate around which we all co-ordinate and arrange ourselves. And He is also imminently in touch with all, bathing all in His light. Yet He is Abnormal, in that all are like Him, yet He is unlike all, for He transcends all. It seems to me that He is both the Normality whose expirations keep us afloat, and the Abnormality whose inspirations draw us upwards.

So, to be made in His likeness means gradually transcending into lighter shades of His brilliant shadow. It means enduring more dreadful exposure to His excrutiating light and growing more grateful for His shade, a refuge that allows the skin to cool and eyes to adjust. It means, once readjusted and revitalized, growing more inspired by His inexhaustible light. Finally, it means the unique, abnormal self—that which distinguishes us from the norm—manifests for Him more fully, allowing that authentic planetary uniqueness to blossom and organize into a greater co-ordinating body; a body that strives to embody Him and shine in His image; a body that abnormalizes itself through normalizing Him.

My words can go no further…

1. “…Neither, as I believe, does Homer ever make mention of sweet meats. Is not that something which all men in training understand—that if one is to keep his body in good condition he must abstain from such things altogether?…”, Republic, Book III (404c–e)

2. “Foods that are too bitter, too sour, salty, very hot, pungent, dry, and full of chillies, are dear to persons in the mode of passion. Such foods produce pain, grief, and disease.” Bhagavad Gita (17.9)

3. From the Latin con- (“with, together”) + scire (“to know”)

4. Identity means something like “sameness”, derived from the Latin idem (“same”)